Social Enterprise News & Articles

What roles do social technologies play in facilitating collaboration? A new study by Avanade showed a large, but untapped opportunity to fully adopt and leverage social technologies for collaboration at work. 

As companies adopt new tools to help turn themselves into social businesses, why not build on the digital tool everyone already uses -- email? That’s the question IBM must have been asking, and this week it announced “the industry’s first fully integrated social mail solution.” 

When I raise the topic of social enterprise with clients I will often get FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) comments, like "But people can just say what they like!" or "Why do we need social -- we've got [email, instant messaging, team sites, etc.]" or "What if someone posts inappropriate pictures?"  

The great thing about conferences is that by the end of them, you usually have a better idea about products and vendor offerings. The SharePoint conference is Las Vegas is no different. However, true to form, Microsoft has only half-answered one of the burning questions of this year: what will it do with Yammer?

In the world of business, knowledge is the most powerful asset that your employees, customers and partners can leverage to sustain a collaborative social culture. The ability to connect the right people with the right knowledge is critical to business success. Becoming a social enterprise makes this possible, but what is needed to sustain the social enterprise vision?

Collaboration is not a new thing organizations suddenly know how to do, they've been doing it for years. But the technology and the strategies that support enterprise collaboration have changed and are still changing. A hallway conversation, a telephone call, an email -- these are still common ways to work together, but social technologies are starting to take center stage. And it's only just begun.

And you say you want a revolution, we all want to change the world….

Salesforce's John Wookey, executive vice president of Work.com and social applications, was excited to debut Work.com at the Dreamforce conference this week. Here's why he was so jazzed.

Last week we reported that Salesforce's Marc Benioff was readying a number of technology releases to compete in the social business space. Work.com was one of those releases, unveiled yesterday at Dreamforce, due to become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year.

If there is one feature that everyone can agree upon in the Social Enterprise market, it’s mobile computing. IT professionals think it’s an important part of the Social Enterprise landscape and vendors fervently concur. As always, the devil is in the details.

In the world of Social Enterprise vendors, everyone wants to be a “platform.” Subsequently, it’s rare to hear an ISV talk about the platform it uses to create a social application other than its own. And yet, Microsoft SharePoint often comes up in discussions of all sorts of Social Enterprise applications. Several companies are using the sharing, collaboration and workflow capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint to provide the basic underpinnings of their social applications.

In my role at 451 Research I have had the pleasure of looking at our markets afresh, and in particular looking at what direction the emerging Social Enterprise is really going in. It’s a market that is as full of buzzwords as it is hype, with money and attention focused on this largely cloud-based world of startups and promises. But beneath the hype there are some hard truths that need to be recognized if the promise of the social enterprise is really to deliver. The biggest of which is that culture will always win out.

Bitrix is out with its Bitrix Intranet 11.5 for small and medium-sized businesses. The company said that the new version features a revised collaboration model for the on-premises product, designed for companies that prefer to keep their data on-site.

The Social Enterprise and its supporting technology is being adopted broadly by all types of organizations. In a recent ESG survey of IT professionals in mid- and large-sized enterprises, 74 percent of respondents reported that their organizations had deployed some type of social collaboration or communication tools, with the majority reporting implementation of both. Social tools are a mainstream part of the corporate experience.

As more and more SMBs dive headlong into the big social pool, I often imagine a lifeguard blowing the whistle while pointing firmly to the ‘No running on the deck’ sign. If you go too fast, you’re sure to slip and break something. There are big differences between swimming in clearly defined lanes in the relatively calm confines of the ‘traditional’ marketing pool, as opposed to navigating the undercurrents and sometimes stormy waters of the big social sea.

Wise organizations will learn to swim in the kiddie pool before diving in by following some basic steps to prevent drowning in social channels.